HI
I’m thinking of trying out opensuse. I’m currently using a certain other linux distro that recently released a new version which has had a lot of problems.
So my question is, from the history of opensuse, how bloody do the early adopters of this distro get? Should I just install the current release (11.1) and get on with it? or wait till 11.2 is officially released?
Whats in 11.2 that would make it the one to go to instead of 11.1?
Thanks!
Wait it out 11.2 will be worth it.
I’m wondering about 11.2 as well, and about switching from Gnome to KDE (maybe), so can you tell me what some of the extras are that I can look forward too?
OpenSUSE 11.2 - openSUSE Here is a “non-techie” review of the new stuff in openSUSE;)
P.S. I’m happy that my Wacom Bamboo tablet is working out of the box with 11.2 
I’m impressed with 11.2 RC2 as my mouse side-scroll buttons and my SD card reader all function perfectly out-of-the-box!
I would wait the measley 5 days until 11.2 is officially released.
Thank you for the link – very interesting read
I have been running 11.2 nearly exclusively since RC1.
As a tester of bleeding-edge kernels, I can definitely say that 2.6.31, which is
used in 11.2, is greatly improved over 2.6.27 in 11.1.
I use KDE, and I’m not a fan of KDE4, but I’m gradually getting used to it.
When you install 11.2, any partitions that are reformatted will default to ext4.
My / was installed on such a partition, and I wish I had not done so. The reason
is that ext4 can suffer disk corruption when the system crashes. I was just
chasing a bug in the rtl8187 driver that showed up as a kernel panic, and I
crashed my system as many as 100 times over 4 days. The data corruption happened
3-4 times, thus it is not really common, but it never happens with any of my
ext3 partitions. An fsck run has repaired the damage every time without data
loss, but it might be disconcerting for someone with less Linux/Unix experience
to be presented with a “repair” login when booting.
For rtl8187 users, do not worry. The bug, now squashed, only affected 2.6.32
kernels and compat-wireless drivers.
Thanks all for the feedback.
Still not sure what direction I’m going to take. I am not immune to the allure of a shiny new release, especially when there are big things are promised… but I don’t want to go through another “stable” release bug testing phase either.
Iwfinger, I never had disk corruption and i’ve been using ext4 since Mandriva 2009.1 and openSUSE M8. A friend of mine uses Ubuntu with ext4 since kernel 2.6.28 and never had a problem.
And still if you don’t trust the ext4 there is still option for ext3 and even for ext2 so i don’t see why would anyone stay with the old openSUSE:
On 11/07/2009 11:16 AM, Siminin wrote:
>
> Iwfinger, I never had disk corruption and i’ve been using ext4 since
> Mandriva 2009.1 and openSUSE M8. A friend of mine uses Ubuntu with ext4
> since kernel 2.6.28 and never had a problem.
> And still if you don’t trust the ext4 there is still option for ext3
> and even for ext2 so i don’t see why would anyone stay with the old
> openSUSE:
I’m glad you never had ext4 disk corruption, but I did. Admittedly, my case was
special, but I am not alone as this problem has been discussed on the Linux
Kernel Mailing List. There is no fix as yet. Perhaps this is a regression and
older kernels do not have the problem.
I agree that one should update or install 11.2 for a new installation.
OpenSUSE 11.2 should be fine and with no noticeable bugs once it’s released. 11.2 RC2 users report that it’s virtually bug-free, you don’t see any bugs in your normal day-to-day routine computer work. And any ‘hidden’ bugs (you know, the tiny flaws in software packages and such) will most likely be fixed in the final release of 11.2.
11.2 is also a good choice since it features KDE 4.3 and GNOME 2.28, both of which are stabler than the versions in 11.1 (KDE 4.1, GNOME 2.24). KDE 4.3 is a huge improvement over KDE 4.1… Lots of bugfixes. So if anything, you could say that 11.1 would crash and freeze more than 11.2 because of KDE 4.1.
I’d recommend that you wait for openSUSE 11.2. There’s only 4 days to wait now. When 11.2 is released, download the LiveCD, test it, and if it works fine, install it straight from the LiveCD desktop. Don’t be alarmed if openSUSE 11.2 running from the LiveCD seems very slow: it’ll be all right once you’ve installed it. LiveCD desktop sessions are normally slow, but once you’ve installed openSUSE, the system will be very fast and responsive compared to the LiveCD session.
Have fun running openSUSE 11.2!
Have you ever seen a bug free release of anything? ‘Hello World’ perhaps…
I agree that 11.2 has seemed to be very well put together, building up to the launch, and that a new user would be advised to go for it - and then perhaps to try 11.1 if 11.2 proves problematic for them.
But any new release will have new bugs - and some of them won’t have been found. They just won’t. That’s just the way it works…
Agreed. But from what I’ve seen in the RC’s, it’s going to be very good, with no serious bugs like the koala has.